A few weeks ago, NSIDC put out this press release, claiming that 5+ year old ice is at its smallest level on record.

The press release included the map below. This is a new style map which they just started in week 39 2015. The map below is for week 41 2015. All of their previous 1984-2015 maps have been deleted from their archive.

The good news is that Chris found one of their old style maps which had not been scrubbed from their website. NSIDC has deleted the original graphs, but seem to have forgotten to get rid of the copy.

For some strange reason “Steve” neglects to mention this text that accompanied the “old style map” he so proudly displays:

Checking out the detailed information provided about the NSIDC-0611 EASE-Grid Sea Ice Age, Version 3 would further reveal:

The sea ice age data in these files are derived using data from satellite passive microwave instruments, drifting buoys, and a weather model. With these data sources, the formation, movement, and disappearance of sea ice can be observed; and these observations can, in turn, be used to estimate ice age (Maslanik et al. 2007). The ice age data are derived from a number of passive microwave imagers: the Scanning Multichannel Microwave Radiometer (SMMR), the Special Sensor Microwave/Imager (SSM/I), and the Special Sensor Microwave Imager Sounder (SSMIS). Visible and infrared data from the Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) were also utilized through 2004. In addition, International Arctic Buoy Program (IABP) drifting-buoy vectors and the National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP)/National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) Reanalysis Project (CDAS) are used to augment the satellite data (Tschudi 2010).

Version 3 – April 2016.

So there you have it “Steve”. Thanks to the sterling (albeit uncredited!) efforts of the all volunteer members of the Arctic Sea Ice Forum and the (presumably still paid?) scientists at the National Snow and Ice Data Center you can now explain the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth of the matter to your own loyal readers.

A few weeks ago the NSIDC upgraded their sea ice age product from version 2 to version 3. Here’s what the latest version of 1984 week 41 looks like:

Can you spot the difference Tony?

[Edit – May 1st 2016]

In partial answer to a question posed below, here’s an animation of Arctic sea ice age from September 2010 to May 2015. Can you see what has happened to the old ice Tony?

20 thoughts on ““Steve Goddard” Busted”

Looks like we won’t have “Steve Goddard” to kick around anymore… Heller has decided to now troll the internet using his real name. When will Willard Watts emulate Heller and start to post using his actual name?

The “rebloggers, retweeters, plagiarisers and other assorted acolytes” have been comparatively quiet on this one. “Caleb” has regurgitated Heller’s bilge verbatim, and advertised the fact at WUWT. Needless to say my corrective comment is currently invisible at the home of “Truth, beauty and laughter”.

Here is something interesting, when talking about the movie Climate Hustle Tony Heller says, “the movie has lots of Al Gore graphs, but none of mine” & “Unfortunately they cut out all of the temperature data stuff.”

Not a lot of people know that Paul Homewood has allegedly been libelling the BBC’s Environment Analyst. Whilst checking Paul’s blog in vain to see if my recent comment had seen the light of day I stumbled upon this:

Now it’s NSIDC’s turn to be caught red-handed fiddling the data and cooking the books.

NSIDC – National Snow and Ice Data Center – is the US government agency which provides the official statistics on such matters as sea ice coverage in the Arctic.

Naturally its research is of paramount importance to the climate alarmists’ narrative that man-made global warming is causing the polar ice caps to melt. At least it was until those ice caps refused to play ball…

Where the alarmists have for years been doomily predicting ice free summers in the Arctic – according to Al Gore in 2007, 2008 and 2009 it would be gone by 2013 – the truth is that multi-year ice has been staging a recovery since 2009.

Let me see if I understand this.
I had mistakenly assumed that if a certain spot is iced over continuously for 5 years, that a priori, that certain spot contains 5 year ice.
But in actuality, ice at that spot might be 2 year ice which has drifted in from elsewhere, and the 5 year ice which used to be there has drifted away. And I have to assume since that 5 year ice is no longer on the map, it must have drifted to a warmer place and melted completely away. (It can’t morph into 2 year ice, for instance.) Or perhaps it is jammed up tightly against other 5 year ice.
So the age of ice at a certain location is determined by such things as imaging, brightness and thickness, and buoy motion vectors to determine where the ice originated. It has nothing to do with how long ice has been continuously present at a certain place.
Do I have it now?
I’m hoping you understand this better than I do, because I have another question. Why would they have to eliminate unrealistic buoy velocities? Their buoys either left one place and got to another place or they didn’t.
Thank you.

It identifies the “fast ice” around the shores of the Arctic Ocean that has remained in place over the winter. All the rest moves under the influence of winds and currents. As the “freezing season” starts newly formed “first year ice” is identified from satellite data and then tracked as it “drifts” around the Arctic Ocean. If it’s fortunate enough enough not to “melt completely away” the next summer it becomes “second year ice” and so on. I’ve added an animation of sea ice age to the article above. Watch what happens at round about week 38 each year.

Regarding the “unrealistic buoy velocities”, the algorithm attempts to track 12.5 x 12.5 km “grid cells” of sea ice. Sometimes the particular ice floe on which a buoy is located will “melt completely away” even though other ice floes remain within the same grid cell. Once a buoy is free floating the data it provides can still be used for weather forecasting for example, but it’s obviously no use for tracking sea ice drift. Occasionally such a buoy can even become embedded within the sea ice a second time. See from 3 minutes 25 onwards in this video for an example of that:

No health problems here Lawrence, although the same cannot be said for the Arctic.

I’ve been busy on other stuff whilst waiting for one of the usual suspects to try and pervert the facts under a suitably plagiarisible headline. A dope smoking Colorado whack job has just come up with this one: